Page 27 of Bent Heavens

They had to feed it. Unless they wanted it to starve.

And that’s not what they wanted, was it?

Krista had reminded Liv of the two cross-country meets from which she was banned, but according to Principal Gamble’s edict, she was back on the practice squad today. Liv didn’t waste time deliberating over whether or not to go. She bolted from school at the final bell, got in the station wagon, and on the way home held her phone in a sweaty hand, desperate to call Doug but distressed by the vague, criminal ramifications of establishing phone records.

Instead, she got home, sat trembling on the front stoop, and waited. She knew him. He’d come. A half hour later, he did. His junker pulled into the driveway, and he got out, and she stood up, instantly feeling a bit stronger, and they nodded as if this were the five hundredth day of this new life together rather than the second. They convened in the kitchen, where Doug fished out a Pop-Tart and gnashed it.

“How was your day?” He sounded tentative, hypersensitive to her reaction—all new tones for him.

“I don’t know.” It was the truth: Her head, her heart, her gut were in tangles, but she had no hard recollections of the day’s events. “I just keep thinking … No one else at school…”

Doug nodded excitedly. “I know. No one has any idea. Of what’s here. Of what’s in the universe. It’s incredible. Only we know. Liv, we’re the only ones.”

Liv smiled weakly. Doug’s eyes were as brilliant as they’d looked back in the days of designing the Trick into corn-maze schemata. His life, Liv knew, had been one of lack: no real parents, no close relatives, no other friends, no money, no worthy possessions. Here, at last, he had something no one else in the world had. He would have a plan to go with it. Of course he would.

Doug grinned and unpacked a bag of food from home. A dented can of green beans. A half loaf of bread. Freezer-burned chicken tenders. A bag of frozen mixed vegetables. Liv, glad for a task, explored her own kitchen crannies. A box of frozen mozzarella bites. Nilla wafers. A banana. A bag of Skittles. On impulse she added a foil pack of Pop-Tarts.

The walk out back was easier with Doug. Together they hauled away the pile of wood from the shed door, and Doug selected the padlock key from his key chain. They shared the same sort of glance, Liv thought, of detectives about to bust, guns blazing, into a drug den, and then entered into a familiar dark swirl of dust, a familiar fetid stink, a familiar terrible sight. She could do this. She could do this.

The skinner’s eyes came alive at their intrusion, the same as before, but everything else was different. Its body, hanging slack from its wrists, barely moved in its congealed filth and blood. The hard clench of its heart had become a butterfly flutter, and the lungs inflated slowly. The pink wounds and red abrasions they’d caused had swollen and discolored to purples, browns, and blacks. Liv was breathless, frightened all over again. But these changing colors—they did, in a way, feel like progress.

They were as quiet as if in a church. Doug edged closer to the alien, kneeling alongside it while being careful to avoid its puddle of muck. He emptied his bag, unboxed and unbagged each item, and placed them on the floor in a straight line, as if this was a science experiment, which, in a way, it was. Bread, mozzarella bites, chicken tenders, wafers, mixed veggies, green beans, Pop-Tarts, banana, Skittles: Which, if any, would it lean over and eat? Lastly he took out an old dog bowl of John’s and filled it from a water bottle.

At that, Liv and Doug retreated, latched the padlock, and split up, as prepared as possible for another night of queasy anticipation.

The next day, Liv skipped cross-country again and Doug did not delay, and they returned to the Armory for assessment. It was the first time Liv didn’t feel like the mere sight of the skinner might crumple her. There it was, same as before, horrible and helpless. She didn’t wait for Doug to go first; they both crowded close.

Its choices were unexpected. Liv and Doug scurried outside to whisper about it, easier to do in the dusk light and under a wide-open sky.

“The dog bowl was dry,” Liv hissed.

“Makes sense. Everything needs water.”

“It ate the banana. The whole banana. With just its teeth, no hands. I didn’t see the peel anywhere.”

Doug hadn’t blinked yet. “Same with the chicken tenders. There weren’t even crumbs. And I couldn’t believe the Skittles! I thought—”

“I thought it would choke on them!”

“That’s what I thought! And all the safe stuff, the soft stuff, the bread and beans and Nilla wafers, it didn’t touch them. You think it’s the colors? It likes bright colors?”

“Did you see the Pop-Tarts bag?”

“Chewed right through it.”

They panted together beneath marmalade clouds, faces darkening until they looked like the shadow versions of Liv and Doug that they had, in fact, become. The surrounding insects took the opportunity to establish dominance, chanting louder in rhythmic mockery.

“It doesn’t look good,” Liv said at last.

“The skinner? No shit.”

“I mean … when we found it, it was sort of … clear.”

“And now it’s kind of cloudy,” Doug said. “I know.”

“And the … I guess its membranes? On its elbows and knees? They’re yellow. A bad yellow.”

Doug’s sigh came from a still-obscured face. “It probably has, you know, excrement in its wounds. It’s inevitable.”